A survey of intelligent algorithms for open shop scheduling problem

Abstract

In the open shop scheduling problem, two processing orders named operations within jobs and operations on machines need to be decided. When the problem size becomes large, the existing exact method can hardly solve it. Therefore, intelligent algorithms are introduced to solve the problem. The aim of this study is to find out effective intelligent algorithm which can be used in the open shop scheduling problem. Four intelligent algorithms, namely genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, cuckoo search algorithm and ant colony optimization have been proposed and modified for this specific problem and two experiments have been carried out to compare the effectiveness of these algorithms. The results show that these intelligent algorithms have an acceptable performance and can be used for large scale problems, which cannot be solved by the exact method. Among these algorithms, cuckoo search algorithm is the best one and can solve problems effectively, due to the levy flight and other features. Further research is still required to further improve the performance of these algorithms.